Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by catlifeonmars 698 days ago
Having worked on both (servers and serverless), I personally find the serverless programming model to be fundamentally different. I don’t have time to write, operate or troubleshoot servers. Serverless is a huge productivity boost. I can set and forget some glue piece of functionality and it will operate without the issue. Then I can focus coding up the interesting and differentiated bits.
2 comments

The problem with serverless is that it takes away some things to think about, it adds an equally large new number of things you have to think about.
That’s where I (respectfully) disagree. It’s true that there are new things to thing about, and there are use cases where it’s not appropriate. That being said, overall it’s a net productivity boost and YMMV but for me I’d say it’s 4x or 5x.
I have a python script that fetches a website every few minutes and makes an API call when some conditions are met. I never really figured out all those other AWS or cloud tools and usually just resort to renting a vortual server and running the script via ssh.
That seems the way to go unless you have insane amounts of data. We had some could guys write a pipeline in AWS for us with several steps connected by lambdas that get triggered at each step. The damn thing is just not reliable. It skips some changes or sometimes doesn't work at all. I am sure it can be made reliable but I am beginning to be very skeptical of all this complexity. I think we could write the whole pipeline in 300 lines of Python with the same results but somehow this is not "cool" because it doesn't scale. Never mind that the complex stuff doesn't scale either
That sounds like it works great for your use case. The serverless stuff is best for when you want to do things like customer order processing workflows or distributed packet mirroring orchestration, etc etc